Monday, April 26, 2010

The Week in Review

I spent last week in LA and it was pretty magical. So magical that I wish I had some photos of my own to share, but since my sad little camera died on Monday (even though I FULLY charged it before leaving), I'm going to lift a few photos from the web to make this post somewhat interesting.

stolen from google images

Remember how in Minority Report Tom Cruise was living in the future surrounded by really cool computers that could be controlled with your hands? Well, as Adam and I learned last week, that future has come to the present. We attended an event on 5D and learned that right now, models of those computers are being built and used. Yup, the mouse may soon die out in the future. As will sitting down at a computer.

stolen from Theodore O. on Yelp

I met up with my friend Wooge on Wednesday night and gave in to peer pressure to eat meat. And not just any meat...a whopper of a burger at Father's Office. It was delicious but I'm going to make sure they fully cook mine the next time. Any redness, even a little bit, makes me cringe. The sweet potato fries with the garlic aioli sauce though...heaven.

from the LA Times website. i couldn't find a bigger photo to steal.

On Saturday morning, Adam and I went to the LA Times Festival of Books. This was our fifth time at the event and it was awesome as usual. We went to a panel discussion on how human beings have evolved over time and a Harvard professor argued that cooking has been a core part of our evolution, especially in recent years when fast food liberated women from kitchens and men from depending on women for food. (Interesting, although I personally don't want to award fast food with that much credit.) 

Then we went to a panel on how fiction writers unravel secrets in their stories and then to a talk by Alicia Silverstone on her new book, The Kind Diet. She looked amazing and talked about how a vegan lifestyle completely changed her life, from curing her of asthma and allergies to giving her incredible energy. After listening to her talk, Adam and I changed our dinner plans to Native Foods.

  Then the good stuff really started...we headed out to The Abbey, a trendy gay nightclub in West Hollywood to celebrate a friend's birthday. It was my first time at a gay bar and the place was incredible! It was actually styled like a gothic church and they had a side room that offered some pretty amazing desserts. I had a slice of the banana-chocolate-peanut butter cake and OH MY GOODNESS. divine. even the virgin watermelon-strawberry drink was tasty. kinda wish I lived there. We trekked up and down Santa Monica to a variety of other bars and I saw some impressive cross-dressers (think Jackie O, it was that sophisticated) and some people wearing 12-inch platform boots. In a nutshell, I think I found a few characters I can use in upcoming stories.

I got back home on Saturday night and woke up to the aroma of my mom's homemade banana-apple sauce on Sunday morning. It's something new she's started to make (thanks to a little tip from my aunt from France) and it's so simple I can't believe we ever bought apple sauce from a store. When the time comes, I'm totally making this for my baby as baby food.

Then, to top off the evening, I watched my mom make flan and it came out perfectly. I now know how to make flan. And since we're on this topic of homemade goodness, I've decided I'm going to experiment with making some traditional grocery purchases from scratch at home. Think bread, maple syrup, and pizza.

I don't know why but lately, I think there's a little domestic fairy growing inside me.